Almost Famous

When Robert Fraser was just a small boy, Mr. Elliott, the headmaster of Fan Court, his preparatory school, wrote to his parents, “He enjoys the belief that he is ‘different’ from other boys.” Aesthete, art dealer, homosexual, junkie and ultimately AIDS victim, who dies in 1986, Fraser is the subject of Harriet Vyner’s oral biography (the book is constructed of quotes from recorded interviews with a variety of people plus fragments of written matter). The telling word in Elliott’s letter is “enjoys.” Whether Fraser was really different from other boys remains, at this point, to be seen. What is clear, however, from this and other comments is that Fraser, even at 10 (and he can’t have been much more than that at the time), believed himself to be different and relished that difference.

Fraser was born in August 1937, the youngest of three children (he had an elder brother and a sister who later died in a car crash). His father, Sir Lionel Fraser, was a successful banker who was the son of the butler of Gordon Selfridge, the retail millionaire, and who had started life as a newspaper delivery boy. Robert Fraser was educated first at Fan Court, a Christian Science school (both his parents were Christian Scientists) and then at Eton, England’s most famous and select public (that is to say, private) school. He did his National Service in Kenya, then became a fashionable art dealer and a pivotal figure in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, hence the “Groovy Bob” of the title.

Vyner’s book offers, in many ways, a fascinating slice of social history in following the life of Fraser, who was at the heart of it all. “Swinging London” was a happening place. According to actor Dennis Hopper, “That sixties time in London was the greatest. I knew I was in a place where all the creation of the world was happening. The Beatles and the Stones had just happened.... It was just sensational. The art world, the fashion world, they were exploding. It was the most creative place I’ve ever seen.” Fraser belonged to a high bohemian group of well-connected, well-off young men and women who played key roles in the development of a kind of artistic and social ethos, who defined mores and manners and who created a climate in which, for instance, bisexuality became fashionable. London was full of beautiful people, and Fraser was one of them.

He knew everyone, or rather anyone who was anyone: Kenneth Anger, David Bailey, John Paul Getty, Terry Southern, Andy Warhol, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles, their various girlfriends and hangers-on; the list is endless (it is somewhat puzzling, not to say depressing, that the whole scene comes across as rather parochial--the overall impression is of a world turned in upon itself).

Drugs played a huge part in Fraser’s life. Anita Pallenberg, who was the girlfriend of Rolling Stone Brian Jones at the time, is quoted as saying that he “was the first person I know of who had LSD in London.” (In her 1994 autobiography, “Faithfull,” Marianne Faithfull recalls that Fraser “retained pretty much his usual caterpillar cool” on acid). In February 1967, when he was already addicted to heroin, Fraser was busted with the Rolling Stones in the famous Redlands drug bust in Sussex and sent to prison for six months. Jagger was sentenced to three months and Keith Richards to a year. Jagger’s and Richards’ sentences were quashed on appeal, but Fraser ended up serving four months.

This may in part have been because Fraser was found in possession of a larger quantity of a more serious drug (24 tablets of heroin) than the other two, but it also seems possible that the police wished to make an example of an Old Etonian. Certainly the press reports of the time (also quoted here) made much of his supposed upper-class background. One was headlined “The Private Shame of Robert Fraser: The Gallant Old Etonian Who Won Too Late His Battle Against Drugs.” Faithfull, however, claimed, in “Faithfull,” that the police treated “Christopher Gibbs and Robert Fraser, the Old Etonians, ... with the utmost reverence,” and a source quoted here has the police saying to Fraser, “It wasn’t really you we wanted, it was that [expletive deleted] Mick Jagger.”

The critic and curator Bryan Robertson comments, “ ... [T]he social thing, the old, ghastly thing ... will grip England for ever, I’m talking about a class thing.” It is true that class can never be ignored in Britain. But the ‘60s was a time when the upper classes and the working classes (in London, at least) joined forces against the bourgeois respectability of the middle classes--what writer Jonathan Meades termed the “social funfair of the Sixties.” East End boys like David Bailey and Terence Donovan started hobnobbing with aristocrats and, as a result, it became fashionable for people to talk with cockney accents.

Fraser’s life, as portrayed here, seems to have been more about drugs than anything else. Drugs provided the subtext to his daily life. Art, sex, money, all came second to drugs. His friendships were forged in drugs, in oblivion. And it was a time when getting wasted, getting out of it, was what it was all about. He wasn’t the only one. When Jagger and Chrissie Shrimpton first took LSD together, the experience was something of a disaster for Chrissie, but it paid dividends for Mick: He wrote “19th Nervous Breakdown” about Chrissie’s subsequent collapse. Shortly afterward, in December 1966, Tara Browne, the son of the fourth Baron Oranmore and Browne, was killed in a car crash on the Embankment, out of his mind on acid. Lennon and McCartney wrote “A Day in the Life” about his death (one of the lines runs “Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords”). Then came the flux of people going to Morocco and smoking dope. A generation, whose parents’ drug of choice had been alcohol, found themselves embracing substances that apparently enabled them to feel the Earth’s heartbeat.

The cliche about the ‘60s--that if you remember them, you weren’t there--should hold true here. But one of the peculiarities of the ‘60s is that the people who experienced them very intensely not only appear to remember them with a kind of loving nostalgia, they also remain totally fascinated by the period, giving rise to the kind of parochialism that manages to be the prevailing mood of Vyner’s book. Kenneth Anger is quoted as saying, “I do kind of miss the creative chaos of those years.” It was a time when, in the words of one artist from the period, “you felt you could do anything.” The fact of everyone’s being young clearly contributed.

Faithfull has described “Groovy Bob” as “the best explanation of the importance of the Sixties” that she has read. I know what she means, but what the book actually does is make one doubt that the ‘60s were at all important. By the time I reached the India period of Fraser’s life (this was when one had to go to India to find oneself), the whole thing was beginning to seem like a bad joke, or a pastiche of itself. Recollections like this one from designer Ken Lane don’t help: “I saw him in India, Madras, with the dancer Karma Dev. They had a house on the beach. I remember an absolutely marvellous banana-leaf lunch they gave us.”

Given that Fraser was supposed to be such a gifted dealer, it seems strange that one of the few revealing anecdotes about pictures in the book comes from Bridget Riley, the British artist who is credited with being the inventor of Op Art. She was having a show of about 50 “very small drawings, using blacks, whites, greys and pencil notes ... close-framed, in Perspex, so that one only saw the actual image.” After trying all day to hang them, they were in despair. Returning to the gallery the following morning, Riley found that Fraser “had painted the entire place black--walls, ceiling, all the woodwork, everything was completely black. And so these little light, pale studies, very fragile pieces of paper, shone, and were set off in the most amazing way. And the whole place looked absolutely beautiful.” Suddenly Fraser becomes interesting.

But, more often, he appears as “fundamentally an outsider” who “didn’t understand other people’s needs ... a promise not fulfilled.” (This description comes from Riley.) Without wishing to be overly psychoanalytical, it is tempting to speculate that his feelings of alienation led him to drugs and that the drugs, in turn, must have contributed to his apparent alienation. But other travelers on the drug road loved and admired him. “Robert was the hippest person I ever met,” said American artist Jim Dine. Hopper says, “ We were visionaries, exploring.”

“Groovy Bob” abounds with artists’ complaints; he seems to have been especially bad at paying his artists. Clive Barker said, “You always knew where you were with Robert--he always let you down.” At times it seems impossible to take him seriously, that his involvement with art was just another aspect of a frivolous personality. If we believe the book, Fraser’s gallery was the center not just of the artistic world but of everything groovy that was happening in London at the time. This was not actually the case.

The late critic David Sylvester commented in a review of the book, which appeared in the London Review of Books, that John Kasmin, another contemporary dealer, “thought hard about art where Fraser had a hip reliance on intuition,” but in the same piece he also makes it clear that, despite his flaws, Fraser had both flair and vision. His role, however, seems to have been primarily as a catalyst, both socially and artistically. He made things happen, not all of them good. Such people may be necessary; we don’t necessarily have to like them.

Vyner must have been much younger than Fraser, but her devotion to Fraser shines through. This book is a labor of love, all the more commendable because one rather doubts that Groovy Bob merited the love and attention he got then--and now. I only met Fraser once, very near the end of his life when he was desperately ill. On the way to lunch, my then-husband warned his 14-year-old son Ralph, my stepson, that he might find Fraser’s appearance alarming (Fraser had Kaposi’s sarcoma). In the event, Ralph was unfazed and so, it seemed, was Groovy Bob. *